the courage of stars
by daggers.silver
Summary: archie andrews spends the last day of july staring up at the water stains on his ceiling.


A/N: i hath returned with another unfinished work :D i technically have more written in the google doc but it is as expected unfinished but this prose is all chopped up and kinda experimental for me so... maybe i'll post a second chapter if it comes to me? i honestly was okay with taking my time on this at first and just adding stuff on as it came to me but i'm an impatient bastard so i'm posting this rn instead x

spoilers for early season 4

rated t i guess cause idk but contains lots of depressed internal monologue and some language

lyrics from otherside - perfume genius

* * *

_even your going _  
_let it find you _  
_even in hiding _  
_find it knows you_

* * *

archie andrews spends the last day of july staring up at the water stains on his ceiling.

the day wans and crawls by on patient legs and he listens to the neighborhood bustle of kids playing in sprinklers, to the click and whir of the air conditioning unit working to keep up with the rising temperature, to the slip and slide of vegas's claws on the hardwood as he's let out in the morning and taken for a walk in the afternoon, the distant shift and creak of the old house reacquainting itself with the regularity of his own mother's presence against the floorboards, to the occasional ping from his phone reminding him a world outside the barest reaches of his home still exists, still spins, moves on.

and he decides to commit the vague, misshapen blots of a past rain on his ceiling to memory. content to just exist for the day, or maybe not to, to just pretend he doesn't.

it's not like it really matters, anyway.

nothing really matters, anyway.

it doesn't matter if people are good, or bad, or whatever the fuck between; the world chews them all up and spats them out just the same. bad people still get away with killing hurting children, good people still get hit by cars and smeared out over the asphalt, and whatever the fuck between still wander around with wide eyes wide enough to look aghast or to shed tears but never wide enough to notice the warning signs, to stop things _before _they happen, _while they happen, _always only _after. _they're all just people doing what they think they need to in order to live. some people just feel like they need to own everybody and everything around them while others feel like they need to pull over for poor souls stranded on the side of the road and offer a helping hand.

and some feel like they need their dads to be alive and breathing in order to just do the very same.

he stares up at the water stains on his ceiling and knows he'll never be able to live up to his dad's memory, his dad's ideals, not even close. the space left behind is too deep, too wide, too infinite and fred andrews-shaped for anyone else to fill. somewhere far in the recesses of his mind, he knows it's a space that's not meant to be filled, but honored, and remembered, held close but not_ too _close to the hearts of those left behind, not clung to with desperate hands but cradled close by, swinging to and fro between them to the rhythm of each second, minute, hour spent living in a world without it - _him _.

but archie's never known anything but desperate hands, clinging to everything he's ever lost because he always loses more, even when he thinks he has nothing left to give, he gives it anyway.

but _this _-

he can't.

he stares and thinks - _knows _\- he wouldn't have made it these past three years without his dad. thinks of all the times he barely kept his head above water save the sturdy shoulders of his father there to hold him up. even when he was lying on sterilized sheets and breathing through a tube, barely there but still _breathing, _that was all archie needed to keep going. every single thing the universe threw his way, he knew he could make it - with fred andrews in his corner, in his life, walking vegas on weekends and washing blood from his clothes, he could make it.

he could _try._

_but this -_

/\

he spends the first week of august doing things like pretending to watch tv and folding his own laundry because he's pretty sure he scared mary that first day. going from one hundred to zero, from trying desperately every day to make sure riverdale's at least treading water to not even trying to get out of bed. it'd catch any mother's eye, and it caught hers when she came into his room to vacuum and found him in the same place he'd been since she bid him goodnight the day before. he'd played it off as much as he could without making eye contact with the elephant in the room, pretending the obvious wasn't so, futile and pointless because everyone and everyone's dog in riverdale could guess why archie andrews might decide to spend a day doing nothing but breathe.

or, trying to.

so he tries, despite saying he wouldn't, couldn't,_ isn't, _and manages to barely make it down the stairs.

he hardly thinks that counts.

nothing counts for much anymore, anyway.

/\

he realizes quite belatedly he stopped eating much unless someone else was there to eat with him. he stopped doing much of anything unless someone else was there, up to and including moving at all. the seconds, minutes, hours take their toll and he spends them frivolously, wastfully, squanders himself to one breath at a time and nothing more; eyes unseeing, ears unhearing, body still and numbed to touch until the nearest body shatters the illusion with just a word or a look.

the first person other than mary to fissure the timelessness is the girl next door, knocking before entering for the first time in years and making herself at home on the edge of his mattress, despite or_ in _spite of his continued silence from the windowsill other than the instinctively proffered _'come in'._

he feels her eyes on him but keeps his on the window, no actual focus, pinpoint flattened to windowpane glaze, eyelids low, limbs unmoving. the leg tucked beneath him to keep steady the other planted on the floor has long since fallen asleep. he wishes for a moment he could drift off just as fast, feels the weight of his lids and the bags underneath and supposes insomnia is better than nightmares.

"you weren't reading any of my texts," she finally says, and he thinks she might have said his name before but he doesn't recall hearing it. "or veronica's... or jughead's."

a response slithers to the back of his tongue, coiled and ready and waiting - for what, he doesn't know - but it stays there, no actual words coming forth to shape the muscle, part his teeth, growing stale and rotted in the short stretch of silence that follows. for the briefest of moments, he wonders if he's actually paralyzed, frozen over, unable to shift, move a muscle, even if he wanted to.

he feels locked deep inside his own body.

or maybe he's left it entirely, a formless spirit still tethered to its shell by nothing but a string of consciousness that's starting to feel more and more like a shackle.

"archie?"

he doesn't move but she does, standing from her spot on the edge of his mattress to approach him, careful, cautious, like he might shatter at the sound of her socked feet against the floor, but when her fingers meet the meat of his shoulder and the indistinct shape of her face enters his line of sight, he does no such thing. barely even flinches.

for the briefest of moments, he wonders if he's even real.

he thinks he might not have said a single word in three days.

no - that's not true; the day before, he found himself in the kitchen pouring himself a glass of water when his hand just decided to stop working, fingers gone slack and motionless and floating useless around a cylinder of air as the cup shattered bits of glass and water at his feet. he heard before he saw mary approaching, called out a _'sorry, just - knocked a glass over. i'm okay.' _and hated how honest it sounded coming from his mouth because he _is _okay but his dad is fucking dead and he wishes _he _was fucking dead.

but he's not, and he wasn't, so he swept up the glass and mopped up the water without a single drop of blood being shed.

he almost wishes there was.

/\

he's not a masochist. he doesn't think so, anyway. it's just that the rush of blood to a wound and the corresponding ripple of adrenaline makes him feel more alive than he's felt since all the breath left his body on chock'lit shop tile, puppeteer strings cut, whittled down to almost nothing.

so he gets drunk and picks a fight with some guy who wolf whistles at some girl and tries to start up a clearly one-sided conversation with her. but he's not a hero either, so when the guy backs off with raised hands and an eye roll, archie still stumbles after him and slams his body against the nearest wall with enough force to make his own teeth rattle.

he thinks it's the most he's said in weeks, but later in f.p. jones' police cruiser, he can't quite recall a single word.

they sit in silence on the side of the road until the sun dips the rest of the way below the horizon and the glint off a crack in the windshield finally stops blinding his already swollen eye. the time passes without much thought, or word, or anything, really, beyond a restless quiet archie's grown far too familiar with, and he's not sure how long he waits for the older man to say something before he's reaching for the door handle and stepping back out into the street.

he doesn't acknowledge the responding car door creak or the crunch of stray pebbles under uniform boots.

_"red."_

he only faintly feels the push and pull of his own legs walking away from him and to wherever.

_"hey! _let me drive you home, kid."

he doesn't plan to, but he whirls then, limbs loose and teeth flashing. "oh, is that what you were doing? cause i sure didn't see a lot of driving."

f.p's face twists, slowly, without momentum, brows pinching in something like confusion but what sounds a lot more like anger when his own teeth flash behind curling lips.

f.p. always did do anger best.

"... what the hell are you doing, red? getting drunk, picking fights, not even a month after he's in the ground?" and then there's a pause, and archie just knows he's going to hate whatever comes out of his mouth next, is already spinning back around and stalking to the nearest streetcorner. "you think this is what your old man would have wanted?"

that gets him to stop.

the very air seems to tremble.

the ground too, against the soles of his feet, and it's only when he's turned back and breathing in air too thick with recent rain that he realizes it's him, from head to toe, shivering as if he's coming apart at the seams.

"you know what? that's fucking_ rich, _coming from you. how many hours - _years _\- did you waste at the bottom of a bottle, pissed at my dad for firing you cause you were too busy being a fucking gang leader _addict_ to help run a business? and you wanna get on _my _case for getting drunk and picking fights now that he's _gone?_" he doesn't realize he's moving until he's two feet away from him, breathing hard between words like a man out of water but now that he's going, he's not going to stop. "wearing a _badge, _no less? didn't you dump a kid's fucking _body _in a river?"

and the world suddenly shrinks, reduced to smears and suspended as his mind stalls before he feels the curve of a car door digging into the length of his spine, takes in the white-knuckled hands pinning him there fisted in the collar of his shirt.

f.p.'s eyes are hot coals in hollowed out sockets.

"... don't talk about things you've got no fucking clue about, red."

archie stops breathing.

and still, he gathers his suddenly dry mouth and bothers to continue, to get in the last word, though it's quieter, gathered steam in heavy lungs near depleted save dripping condensation, spat out for the sheriff of riverdale's ears and his ears alone.

"fuck you, mr. jones."

the coals simply flare.

and then, just like that, extinguish entirely, now trembling hands to match archie's giving one final shove before dropping back to holstered sides as their owner turns away, faces out into the night and slides a palm over his lips.

archie finds his knees buckling without the support.

the sound of shoes slipping out over gravel is all that alerts the other man, what has him turning right back around despite having every reason to sit back and watch him fall, keeps him from colliding quite so solidly with the ground, though archie's not sure he could solidly _anything _right now_, _feels that creeping buzz crawling back into his ears to nest, to creep and gnaw just under his skin but never to escape, and the world is a pinpricked smear again, though less so than before, the once twisted features of his dad's best friend's face still visible and now pulled taut into something resembling alarm.

" - whoa, _easy _there, red… fuck, did i hurt you? are you hurt?"

his head lulls forward when surprisingly careful hands run through his hair, feel across the back of his skull for what archie guesses is sign of injury before framing the sides of his face. it takes a moment, but his neck straightens, bears the weight of his own head like it's supposed to, and f.p.'s hands drop back down to his chest where they simply flatten instead of fist, reach out to grasp his shoulders like archie might just slip away if he doesn't.

the adrenaline seems to have evaporated entirely and the world shifts itself back into 2d as easy as one sinks into a hot tub, beat by beat to take in the temperature but melting down below the surface far quicker than one probably should.

archie thinks he must have mastered the art of breathing underwater by now.

"i'm trying to _help _you, archie," and it's quieter than anything either of them said to each other that night, resigned and world-weary, cracking through and shattering the silence in a way their shouting wasn't able to before. befitting perhaps another world where archie never left the confines of the police cruiser, where f.p. never followed after him, where both of them were able to sit together and say fred andrew's name without cutting themselves on the pieces. "... this isn't a path you want to go down."

archie wants to say _'i know', _wants to say _'thank you for trying', _wants to apologize for words that might have been true at a time or even true this very moment but ones he didn't _mean _or even remotely believe f.p. deserved to have hurled in his face by his dead best friend's son.

instead he says _'i'm fine',_ and it sounds a lot less honest coming from his mouth than it did the last time.

instead he stares, more _through _than _at,_ and commits these vague, misshapen shadows cast over f.p.'s face to memory.

/\

f.p. starts to visit more. not archie, but his mom, footfalls heavy and shuffled in comparison to hers in the early a.m. of multiple mornings. he's not sure if he tells her about the incident the other night, but neither of them ascend the familiar_ snap_ _crackle pops_ of the stairs to scold him, so he figures he must not have. but he does search out archie's eyes when he finally comes down one morning, sends the faintest of smiles and _'hey kiddo'_s in his direction, and that's when archie stops breathing again.

it's ironic, the cursed little motions that never coaxed to dormancy like the others, up and just deciding to stop working, lungs gone slack and motionless and floating useless in his chest until he nods, facade flickering, and the next exhale shudders out of his throat like a splintered support beam finally collapsing under the weight of - of -

/\

it's only a matter of time before jughead joins his dad for a visit and he, too, knocks before entering for the first time in years, though archie doesn't really bother to respond from his place sat staring at the wall and jughead doesn't really bother to wait for an answer. he leaves the door open and joins him on the bed with at least a foot of space between them.

it almost feels like breaking a promise when his gaze tears itself away from nothing to meet that of his friend's, still slow and unfocused, but moving all the same.

it's jughead who speaks first.

"what happened to your face?"

and he doesn't really _look _at jughead, or listen to the words, or feel his own black and blue skin wrapped around his bones, but instincts pick up the slack, reach impulse fingertips up to trail over the mottled flesh around his eye, his jaw, his lip.

he shrugs, thinks to say _'you should see the other guy' _like he knows archie andrews, fred andrews' son would say, but jughead really probably shouldn't because the other guy wasn't wasted and _he _definitely _was._

but jughead doesn't point out his non-answer, was probably informed by betty or anyone else of his new lack of vocabulary, and instead takes his bruised knuckles in surprisingly careful hands.

and archie's back _there _in the span of a blink, sat on an empty curb after threatening to kill an innocent man in his own home, not twenty-four hours after - _after -_

he jerks his hand out of jughead's as if he's been burned. thinks maybe he has, fingers tingling, biting, humming, pied piper tune that shuts down every last cell in his body in a way that leaves his head reeling, eyes shuttered, muscle and sinew stretching and pulling and locking into position, ready to release like a cracked rubber band at a moment's notice.

"... archie, _talk _to us. _please."_

the words ring empty in his ears.

he goes back to staring, this time at the floor, and tries not to feel.

he wishes he could bury himself.

jughead stays until his dad has to leave, exuding reluctance to the very last second he disappears behind archie's doorframe, the door itself still left wide open.

/\

"... have you lost weight?" is one of the first things veronica asks, voice small and lost and sudden after the small talk eventually withers and dies over a breakfast he actually bothered to join, voice tentative and slow, and he can feel practically everyone in the room whip their heads toward him and search if there's any truth to her words or not, and when his mom presses with a weak _'archie?', _he figures they've come up with the former.

the cement coating his insides moves to his throat, his gums, so he shrugs and makes a point of eating his third bite of eggs as if it proves something.

it tastes like the construction site used to smell.

nobody seems to know what to say after that, but archie can feel their eyes on him until he swallows the very last crumb off his plate and then some.

/\

he can't help but feel like he's disappointing him, even beyond the grave.

he can't help but feel like even if that's not true, the fact that he'd think that of his dad in the first place would disappoint him too.

/\

he wakes up screaming for the first time in a long time. the smell of burnt flesh and wet earth clings more so to the backs of his eyelids than his nostrils, echoes of time long lost reverberating through his bones until coming to feels more like climbing through quicksand, slow, heavy, claustrophobic, sheets tangled and body pressed back against the wall as he rapidly blinks the grains away.

it's only then he remembers that the last time this happened, his dad was there to rouse him, to keep him from rattling down to microscopic bits, suffocating on his own memories, and recalling that is a tighter vice around his throat than any recollection of brands or bullets.

the weight of it feels like it could kill him.

if not now, someday soon.

he hopes it's someday soon.

but then his mom is bursting into the room instead, eyes wide and glinting in the dark, her own breaths coming heavy and quick not unlike his until she takes in the state of his bed, his body, approaches with trembling fingers that reach out with a learned patience to catch him.

for the first time in a long time, he doesn't fight it.

he thinks it must be exhausting, to be woken by the sound of your loved ones screaming in the night. but then he remembers he was there to rouse his dad too, to keep him from drowning in the throes of whoever's blood stained his subconscious this time, remembers starting to the sound of his own name being cried out down the hall, heart leaping in his throat to strangle him until he was able to see brown eyes clear and lucid staring back at him.

they leaned on each other. supported each other, kept each other alive and breathing.

except this time.

this time, archie fucked it up, fucked it all up like he always fucking does and now he's not sure if he can keep on breathing without him.

but he still does,_ is, _rigor mortis lungs expanding, contracting, pushing air out across mary's arm and gulping it back down as though it's an elixir, capable of fixing the unfixable, and he knows he's bargaining, bargaining, bargaining, scrabbling at the feet of the universe for anything it's willing to possibly give - give him and his family for all they've sacrificed and suffered with nothing in return. nothing but more sacrifice and suffering.

it cost him his childhood and his dad his fucking _life._

but for all the bizarre that goes on in riverdale's streets, the dead still stay dead. for all the times they thought someone breathed their last breath only to have the supposed deceased reappear later with organs still functioning, it came at the cost of some nameless soul's life in their stead, a stand-in to take the fall and brace theirs.

but not his. not his dad's. you can only dodge death so many times before it learns all your tricks.

and he trusted the shake in veronica's grip, the resignation in betty's voice, the _'yeah, arch... it's your dad.' _that slammed the final nail in fred andrews' coffin as well as his own.

there's nothing he can do but cling with desperate hands until they bleed and break, scrabble useless like a stray dog hoping for scraps because there's no point in pride anymore, no point in _anything _anymore, no pride, no shame, good, bad, between - just people trying to _live _in any way they know how.

archie doesn't know _how_.

but the body needs no manual to breathe, and his follows without instruction, caters to the hands brushing through his hair, rubbing his back, ushering him to his feet and down the stairs in blinks of time long lost to the space between his lungs and his lips. everything fades, smears, or maybe he does, becomes a phantom filling the blanks left behind beneath the andrews' roof.

he thinks it suits him.

except he doesn't sink through the couch when he's set there, doesn't feel the ghost sensations of the blanket wrapped across his shoulders floating down through his spine, doesn't really feel it _not _either; simply sees the swoop of fabric settled there, the bend of mary's fingers wrapped around his own as she places a glass of water in them and guides it to his lips when he doesn't do it himself. it tastes a hint of metal, still tangy from the tap. it wakes up at least one of his senses, bleeding through to a couple more and freeing a valve somewhere that lets loose the pressure built up behind his eyes.

the buzz quiets to faded hum, lullaby soft, or maybe that's mary, but he hears it, listens, and he's not sure how long they sit together watching the streetlight fade behind the curtains to morning glow, he just knows there's eventually a knock at the door that mary opens to reveal two faces instead of one, familiar shaded jaw versus clean-shaven, dark brown versus gray, and archie forgets to greet them until he hears _'sorry, it's just... been long night', _but tom keller beats him to it with a small wave and a _'hey kid'. _

f.p. nods his agreement.

archie nods his.

there's a second of deliberation, hesitant hover, and archie knows it's because of him so he hurries to amend it, offers to retreat upstairs to give them whatever privacy they usually had over early morning coffee but f.p. just shakes his head and tom assures him it's not necessary, both figures trailing toward the kitchen before he can insist.

so he stays, watches the golden rays wash the windows brighter until he lets himself sag into the cushions, stretch out across them and face the back where he drifts off to a half sort of sleep almost immediately, floating along oblivion's surface with lax limbs and shallow breaths to the rhythm of the whispers in the next room over.

time warps. as it often does in the morning, on the couch, under closed lids during daytime, and he loses track - not that he was keeping it in the first place.

but suddenly he's awake, more so than seconds before, and his lungs are shrinking again, shriveled small in his chest and shuddering as though he's spent the morning jogging like he used to but he's still lying flat on the couch with his back toward the room, and it's only when a hand lands between his shoulder blades and a voice says his name that his mind finally catches up, backtracks through the half heard conversation and picks out words like _'freddy' _and _'remember when' _and - and -

"look at me, red."

he just squeezes his eyes shut tighter.

"archie."

archie hates crying in front of adults even more than he does his peers, hunches his shoulders further as if his cocoon of furniture and limbs can save him when the hand climbs there atop the blanket and tugs - not forcefully, insistent, but almost a question, asking, prompting, and he finds he still doesn't have it in himself to fight it.

not anymore.

but he guesses he still has more pride left than he thought, eyes sliding open to stare at the stainless ceiling instead of meeting the dark ones staring back at him.

something wet and warm trails down his temple and buries itself in his hair.

_he can't do this._

so he says as much, all his practice perfected reassurances worn down to dust underneath his tongue, dead horse flogged to bare bones, _'i'm fine' _s and _'i'm okay' _s floating useless in the back of his throat where they taste of bitter rain from old gutters instead of petrichor.

f.p.'s hand just squeezes from its place still on his shoulder. "you can. i know you can." a pause, and his eyes flick somewhere past the couch. "but you don't have to do it alone, you hear me?"

another tear soaks through his lashes and f.p. doesn't move to brush it away.

something in archie cracks, then, something brittle and sharp, molded and flaking down to microscopic bits in slow motion crumble, quicksand slow, heavy, claustrophobic, but he's barely breathing as it is anyway; not since all the breath left his body on chock'lit shop tile.

"... i don't _want _to do this."

and they sound more like choked breaths than words, all strung up and strangled and dying in the back of his throat, mingling truth with lies with everything between.

he feels like he'll always disappoint him, before and after the grave, in thought and in action, from first breath shared to final, from beginning to end to everything between, he'll always cling with desperate hands instead of reverent to everything he's ever lost and then some because he can't stand to lose any more and he _hates _himself for it.

_he has nothing left to give._

except, f.p. inhales a breath that sounds more like leftover liquid being sucked through a straw, says _'i know' _like it physically costs him instead of _'but you will, for your old man - you will', _blinks glassy eyes closed for just a moment instead of spewing jaded platitudes shaped by lips long practiced with the language of tough love, if any love at all.

no - he knows that's not true.

f.p. says, _"i know, archie," _with a voice that sounds like gargled glass, and archie believes him.

* * *

_rocking you to sleep _  
_from the otherside_

* * *

A/N: idk why the idea of archie saying 'fuck u' to someone immediately followed by calling them mr/mrs is so funny to me idmskvjds

in hindsight i lowkey just wrote out the five stages of grief via archie andrews minus outright acceptance but i'm like. rly hoping i can eventually maybe at some point in the future that is unspecified post a second chapter with more actual recovery vs the more slow deconstruction of grief that is the first one. but as always pls don't hold out for it cause i'm so unpredictable i'm rly sorry folks .-. but this felt kinda experimental for me prose-wise? like almost more passive or something? idk if it came through but rereading it felt sorta different from my usual stuff. also my first time writing fp rip me BUT. thank u so much for reading, friends. ~shrek voice~ really really. ilu & any & all feedback u have or don't have to offer.


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